Swipe to play deck-building roguelike Meteorfall: Journeys, now on Android

Deck-building games are a dime a dozen these days, but those that offer an interesting twist on the formula are more than welcome. Enter Meteorfall: Journeys, a deck-building roguelike from Sloth Werks that won’t have you spending a bunch of money to get the rarest cards.

Instead, you go on runs through various dungeons or other settings, and you’re presented with options in the form of swiping right — a confirmation — or swiping left — the negative response. You play one of four classes, each with a different starting deck and play style.

The gameplay works like this: you have an amount of health, an amount of stamina and a limited amount of turns when in battle. For instance, you might have nine stamina and four turns. A basic attack card deals three damage and costs nine stamina to use. You use multiple cards until your four turns are up, and then the enemy gets a similar kind of turn. In this scenario, you wouldn’t be able to spend all four turns on basic attack cards, because that would require 12 stamina.

That’s where swiping left comes in. You can recover health and stamina by foregoing an attack or other play of a card. Then, of course, there are cards that produce various effects. The Greybeard character, a wizard, has a two-stamina-cost Meditate card that restores a charge on any of his spell cards. He will also have normal attack cards, but others like Fireball and Ice Bolt mix things up in a big way.

In between monster battles, you are also presented with various choices. You could be presented with a chance to go to the blacksmith to upgrade your cards OR go looking for treasure, which will award you a couple random cards. The game warns you, though, that you don’t want to accept every card you find because it could dilute your deck and make you less likely to draw your best cards.

These decisions — where to go, when to battle and when to rest, etc — all take up turns from a counter that will eventually lead to that area’s boss battle once it reaches zero.

I haven’t put together a full review on this game, but I’m enjoying it an awful lot. There are definitely some similarities to the TiNYTOUCHTALES games like Card Crawl and Miracle Merchant, and some of the strategies and design remind me of Solitairica, a phenomenal card battler. It’s safe to say I’ll be putting a lot more time into Meteorfall in the near future.